Metaverse has biggest quarter on record for rounds of funding in Q1 2024
Investments into Epic Games and Magic Leap lifted the segment, reflecting growing interest around augmented reality/virtual reality hardware and metaverse hubs.
Biography
Ian Hughes is a senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence and has been covering the evolution of industrial IoT from the basics of instrumentation to richer data applications such as predictive maintenance and machine learning at the edge. This coverage is now moving toward digital twins and the real-time industrial metaverse. He looks at changes to the way we interact with technology, and one another, through AI, IoT, game technology and media across what will become the metaverse at work and play. He has over 34 years of experience in emerging technology, the first 20 years as a software engineer and architect building and sharing concepts, from early web and e-commerce, IoT, social media to virtual worlds. He became an enterprise metaverse evangelist in 2006, known for putting the Wimbledon Championship tennis experience into a shared avatar-based experience. Later, with his own consulting company, he built virtual training hospitals and educational experiences. Ian had his own slot on a Saturday morning TV show for 39 episodes in 2010/11, showing emerging technology to a younger audience. He has written and published two science fiction novels under his online name/nom de plume, epredator. Ian has a Bachelor of Science degree in IT from De Montfort University. He was made an Honorary Doctor of Technology by Solent University in 2018, and he is chair of BCS animation and games specialist group.
Geographic Coverage
Global
Recent Research from Ian Hughes
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Metaverse Digest 6: A roundup of latest global, enterprise and industrial developments
The ebb and flow of metaverse movements continues. The drive into industrial metaverse has strengthened with cloud APIs, and media and entertainment giants are cutting deals in the consumer space. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has opened another facet of its metaverse strategy.
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MWC 24 had less prominent metaverse pizzazz than in 2023, but more practicality prevailed
GenAI got the lion's share of the focus at the Barcelona-based conference. It could be telling that it is not really the right conference for where things are now in enterprise, industrial and consumer metaverse. There were still some elements worth noting despite that.
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NVIDIA continues support for industrial metaverse evolution with Omniverse cloud APIs and AI
At GTC 2024, NVIDIA highlighted the importance of a ground truth, a digital twin and digital thread, for engineering data for design and operation in the $50 trillion heavy industries. With Omniverse and OpenUSD, the company sits at the center of an ecosystem including partners like Siemens driving practical industrial metaverse applications.
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Global metaverse revenue claws its way back to growth in 2023
Key metaverse vendors such as Epic Games, Roblox and Siemens continued to refine their offerings in virtual 3D spaces, and their diligence resulted in a 6.2% increase in 2023 revenue to $19.26 billion.
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Metaverse Digest 5: A roundup of the latest global, enterprise and industrial developments
Several developments are impacting the direction of the metaverse, all tucked in with further GenAI moves. Disney's investment in Epic's Fortnite almost eclipsed the long-awaited Apple Vision Pro headset release.
More research from Ian Hughes
New Alert Set
"My Alert"
Failed to Set Alert
"My Alert"
